TV may be bad for your diet

It’s no surprise that watching too much TV can wreck your diet. After all, those hours on the couch with “Scandal” or “The Big Bang Theory” make it all too easy to pig out — and probably not on carrot sticks.

But one Texas researcher points to a more disturbing reason: People who watch excessive amounts of TV may be confused about what constitutes a good diet and give up on trying to eat healthfully.

Temple Northup examined the relationship between TV consumption and unhealthy food consumption in a study published recently in the International Journal of Communication and Health.

“I was able to find this relationship between watching television and developing these fatalistic views, this view that you can’t understand nutrition,” said Northup, assistant professor in the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston.

“There’s a really strong relationship between having those views and eating poorly.”

Northup recruited a racially diverse group of 591 undergraduate students for the study, which asked questions about their TV viewing habits, their diets and their nutritional knowledge. The subjects also were asked to agree or disagree with statements such as, “There are so many recommendations about eating a healthy diet, it’s hard to know which ones to follow.”

The study had three control variables: participants’ BMI, reported interest in healthful eating and food preferences.

After crunching the data, Northup found that the more participants watched TV, the less nutritional knowledge they had, the more they ate unhealthful foods and the more they had “fatalistic views toward eating healthy.” It’s that last one — the idea that we feel helpless and unable to understand or prevent the cause of obesity or other health problems — that Northup finds most interesting.

“Having the belief that you can eat well is a really important component to going out and eating well,” he said.

So what’s going on? Northup divides TV media into three categories: news, entertainment and advertising, each with its own ability to influence beliefs about nutrition.

We’re bombarded with ads for processed snacks, fast-food restaurants and other less-than-nutritious foods. Entertainment programs often offer more subtle messages: We see characters having drinks in bars or eating in front of the TV, not dining on salads during family meals around the kitchen table. Those messages — whether blatant or subliminal — seem to have a negative impact on our understanding of nutrition.

And when the broadcast news media report on nutrition, it’s often in the form of short segments focused on the latest study. There’s a lot of hyping of certain foods and very little context. The messages often are conflicting. (Are eggs good or bad for you? The answer seems to change every week.) Or we’re flooded with “eat this, not that” messages. No wonder people who watch a lot of TV may lack confidence about their ability to make the right diet choices.

“Getting all these messages that are health related, those can be overwhelming,” Northup said. “Understanding nutrition is really a complicated task.”

Northup said more research into this area is needed.

So what can we do to address the problem? It’s up to the media to modify — or the government to regulate — the messages that appear on TV screens, he said. (Don’t hold your breath).

In the meantime, he said, viewers should be skeptical of what they see and hear, whether it be on an ad or the nightly news. Another solution: Watch less TV.

Jessica Belasco joined the San Antonio Express-News in 2003 and has covered health and fitness since 2008. A Dallas native, she is a graduate of Wellesley College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.